On Monday, April 16th NASA will be launching its most powerful telescope to date. It will be sending up the telescope on a Space X Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. This mission is part of NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite () project. TESS is being hailed as the next step in the search for planets outside of our solar system that could support life. In a two-year survey of the solar neighborhood, TESS will monitor the brightness of stars for periodic drops caused by planet transits. The TESS mission is expected to find planets ranging from small, rocky worlds to giant planets.

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite () is undergoing final preparations in Florida for its April 16 launch to find undiscovered worlds around nearby stars. This un-paralleled survey of the sky will provide researchers targets for future studies that assess the capacity to harbor life.

This will be the first space borne mission to search nearly the entire sky for exoplanets. You might remember NASA’s Kepler missions or it may at least ring a bell. TESS will expand on the Kepler mission’s by targeting closer, brighter stars, where follow-up observations are easier to make. NASA’s Kepler mission kept its telescope constantly fixed on one small section of the sky during its mission. Kepler’s goal was primarily to determine the frequency of exoplanets. The TESS survey will search an area some 350 times larger, covering more than 85 percent of the sky over two years.

The TESS mission will share data with the Webb and Hubble space telescopes back on earth. The ground-based observatories will be able to observe specific properties, such as mass, density and atmospheric composition in greater detail.

TESS is led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research and Principal Investigator Dr. George Ricker. TESS team partners also include
NASA’s
Goddard Space Flight Center, MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, Orbital ATK, NASA’s Ames Research Center, the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI).

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NASA routinely trained shuttle crews for splashdown events, but the cabin hit the ocean surface at roughly 207mph (333km/h), with an estimated deceleration at impact of well over 200 , far beyond the structural limits of the crew compartment or crew survivability levels, and far greater than almost any automobile, aircraft, or train accident. The crew would have been torn from their seats and killed instantly by the extreme impact force.
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The findings are inconclusive. The impact of the crew compartment with the ocean surface was so violent that evidence of damage occurring in the seconds which followed the disintegration was masked. Our final conclusions are:

Some experts believe most if not all of the crew were alive and possibly conscious during the entire descent until impact with the ocean. Astronaut and NASA lead accident investigator
Robert Overmyer
said, "I not only flew with Dick Scobee, we owned a plane together, and I know Scob did everything he could to save his crew. Scob fought for any and every edge to survive. He flew that ship without wings all the way down... they were alive."
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